"Not A One Way Street": Kolkata Knight Riders CEO Drops Hint On Reason Behind Shreyas Iyer Decision

Venky Mysore, the CEO of Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR), admitted that it was a very challenging task for them to trim the retentions down to six ahead of IPL 2025 mega auction after winning the previous season. KKR have made their top retention pick in middle-order batter Rinku Singh (INR 13 crore) followed by Andre Russell (INR 12 crore), Sunil Narine (INR 12 crore), Varun Chakaravarthy (INR 12 crore), and uncapped duo of Harshit Rana (INR 4 crore), and Ramandeep Singh (INR 4 crore).

It meant KKR had to let go of their title-winning skipper Shreyas Iyer, Mitchell Starc, Phil Salt, Venkatesh Iyer and Nitish Rana. “The no brainers would have been maybe 10 or 11 players, but trying to trim that down to six was very challenging, because it's about the players that you have built an equation with and who have done fantastic for KKR.

“Sunil has been with us for 12 years while Andre has been with us for 10 years. Varun has been associated with KKR for a long time, since 2019 and Rinku as well has been with for a significant amount of time, since 2018. Harshit has been with the team for three years while Ramandeep came in last year and really made a big impact.”

“So I think it's a good combination. And at the same time, some of the thinking around how you want to handle the auction also came into play, but we thought that this was a really good combination for us. And, obviously leaving out some of the players is never easy,” said Mysore in a statement issued by the franchise.

Process of retention

He also talked about the process of conversations they had with the players before finalising their retention picks. “First and foremost, I think our approach has always been to maintain transparency and have proper conversations with